Did he just call her disgusting?
Wow!
It left her humiliated, to say the least.
Elia felt like she deserved it for trying to be kind to a person that clearly hated her.
Asheron in particular had shown again and again that he loathed her existence, but still she offered him the food she had cooked in hopes of having an amicable relationship while staying here, in his house.
She tried to be understanding.
She was trying her best to make this contract work as smoothly as possible, but these brothers kept on disappointing her.
Elia couldn’t help but scoff at her own audacity.
They are strangers.
Strangers that would sooner kill than be friends with her.
It was only her habit of being an easygoing doormat that was coming into play.
Not anymore.
She must stop with her facade of kindness that has done no favor to her till now.
Elia decided to come to terms with the truth before it was too late.
The Donovans hate her.
They’d have killed her without a second thought if they had their way, but the mate bond was stopping them from doing it.
To them, she was a nobody, like they were to her.
She should continue to keep it that way.
She would not even acknowledge their presence from this moment on.
They would be nothing but living, breathing walls to her from now on.
‘Clank’ Elia took Asheron’s half-finished pasta plate and dumped the remaining contents into the garbage before putting it inside the dishwasher.
She would run a cycle later.
For now, she left the kitchen without even sparing a glance at the man that had called her disgusting.
If she is so disgusting, then he can cook his food himself.
She was done being a complacent little doll to the men in her life.
Asheron looked in a daze as the human dumped his food before leaving in anger.
Anger?
Why was she angry?
He couldn’t pinpoint anything about their conversation that would make her dissatisfied.
His thoughts, though, didn’t last long.
Worrying about her more than necessary was the last thing he should do.
She was just a human that would stay here until the contract is up.
He wasn’t about to concern himself with matters that weren’t of importance.
After making his decision, Asheron was about to go into his room, but his steps came to a pause without even meaning to.
Something inside him gnawed at him enough to hurt him physically.
He tried to ignore that foreign feeling, but it only grew the more he looked at the closed door of her room.
He wasn’t able to remove the image of her leaving the kitchen without acknowledging him.
Although that is what he deserved.
A person like him didn’t deserve a mate.
With that final thought, Asheron disappeared inside his quiet quarters with turmoil bigger than a hurricane inside his mind.
*****
The next morning, Elia woke up earlier than usual to get ready for her big day.
Today she was going to attend her very first interview.
She put on a semi-casual outfit because the place she was seeking a job from was a flower shop called Fleur.
Without a university degree, all she could offer in the job market were the skills she had learned till now.
It was ironic, really.
The things she was forced to learn to make herself a desirable wife were coming in handy now that her marriage was broken.
It was true that no knowledge goes to waste.
As soon as she stepped out of the villa, everyone’s eyes seemed to focus on her.
Nervousness she had managed to subdue till now started to creep back in.
The reality that she was surrounded by wolf shifters made her scalp go numb in fear.
All she wanted to do was turn around and head back inside the house where she would be safe, but she couldn’t do that.
There was no easy way out of this.
For the next six months, this was where she was supposed to stay.
She has to face these people one or the other day.
And she wasn’t going to let anything spoil her day nor let some strangers bother her.
“Luna!”
Damn, she spoke too soon because here she stood facing a grinning stranger calling her the word that she was starting to get familiarized with.
“I couldn’t believe it when I first heard it, but now that I see it with my own two eyes, a human is really our Luna.” An older man, not a wolf shifter, continued to talk more to himself while he looked at her like she was some kind of a freak case.
That she was.
Being a fated mate to three wolves.
Although unwanted by the latter, it didn’t change that she was now a special existence in this place.
“You don’t know what your presence means to us, Luna.” He said those words while trying to kneel in reverence, “You bring our kind, Hope.”
Elia felt uncomfortable when she saw a man older than her father trying to kneel before her.
“Sir, you don’t have to do this.” She held the old man’s shoulder, wanting to stop him, but the man had other ideas.
“Please, let me do this, Luna. No wolf in a millennium has done the ceremonial greeting reserved for the true mate of their Alpha. Let me have this honor.”
Elia didn’t know what to say.
Ceremonial greeting?
A true mate of their Alpha?
All this sounded like some weird fever dream.
There was so much she didn’t know about, and it was constantly throwing her off guard. Enjoying the story?
As she stood frozen in shock, the old man did his thing and left happily.
And so did some people that were staring at her before.
While the reserved ones continued to gossip far from her while boring their curious gazes on her.
Amidst this excessive attention, Elia made her way out of the pack and to the railway station.
As Mira had said, it was a ten- to fifteen-minute walk from the Crimsonmoon pack.
Once she boarded the train, it took more than an hour to reach the city.
At least she was able to sit through the entire journey, as her compartment was mostly empty.
It seemed like there were not many people near the pack.
With Donovan’s vigilance against humans, it was possible that they had somehow removed the latter near their safe haven.
After getting off the train, she took a taxi to the place of the interview.
‘Fleur’ Was clearly written on the board of the flower shop.
Elia took a deep breath and steadied herself before entering the shop.
Meanwhile, back in the pack, Samuel sat in his office while he went through documents regarding the newly formulated wolfsbane and data collected about the recurrence of the mate bond.
‘Knock knock.’
“Come in.”
One of his subordinates entered the office as he said, “Miss Miller left the pack.”
“Hmm,” Samuel replied while still signing away the documents.
“As you ordered, I put someone to tail her in secret.”
“Good job. Make sure the shifter doesn’t get caught by her. Humans seem to like privacy; I don’t want her uncomfortable.”
“Yes, Alpha,” Beta Marcus replied, “There is another thing, Sir”
Samuel looked up after closing the verified document and waited for the former to continue.
“The head of ‘Revival’ offered a ceremonial greeting to Miss Miller before she left.”
“The old geezer did that?” Samuel couldn’t help but laugh.
The Revivalists, as they called themselves, were a group that refused the idea of shifters taking chosen mates.
They were famous for sticking to their old ways while refusing to change.
They believed a mateless death was more honorable than marking someone just for procreation.
With their ideology, the shifter kind would have probably ceased to exist by now.
Atleast some of his ancestors had sense not to support Revivalists.
Samuel hated them so did his brothers.
Their staunch ideologies and constant ways of trying to revive mate bond was tiring.
He thought of it has futile until now.
He didn’t know if Revival had something to do with resurgence of mate bond, but Elia’s presence would really shake the present shifter politics.
The Revival will definitely see her as their Ally and will try to use her to revive what they believed in.
It was a headache really.